With flippered feet forcing them to walk backwards and bulky wetsuits made even bulkier by the weights around their waists, Steve Brown and his daughter Nicole enter the cold, clear water at Sandy Cove in Terence Bay.

All awkward movements cease once they are deep enough to swim. The Browns, with The Chronicle Herald invited to tag along, soon begin to glide through the beautiful kelp and other spectacular underwater vegetation.

Goofy-looking flounders don’t seem too worried by their human visitors and swim right up to investigate. Feisty little crabs brandish their claws as if spoiling for a fight. A sinister-looking wolffish watches as everyone swims by, and the starfish stays motionless.

Eventually, the divers’ air supply begins to run low and everyone resurfaces.

“To him, I honestly believe that every day is Father’s Day,” Nicole, 23, says of her dad in a seaside interview.

Way back in the days before he was a father, Steve Brown imaginatively fashioned a mock scuba diving set to imitate his hero, Jacques Cousteau.

“I grabbed a tank from the Coca-Cola plant, put it on my back, threw some string together and pretended I was diving,” Brown says.

When he was in his teens, he and his brother Buzzy started diving for real.

Brown, now 48 and living in Tantallon, says he quickly realized his love of scuba diving went pretty deep. Highlights include some wreck dives and catching a dogfish at about 30 metres below.

“It’s better than a banana split,” he says of diving.

When Nicole was little, she would stay on the beach while her father dove for empty bottles and other undersea treasures for her to play with.

“We used to sit on the shoreline and wait for my father to come back in,” she says. “It was just nice to be down by the water and I couldn’t wait to get in the water with him.”

Nicole now also loves the world beneath the waves.

She started diving in her teen years and also followed in her dad’s footsteps by working out and taking up basketball.

Father and daughter both say he was a very demanding parent who always expected the best from his children. It took time, but Nicole says she later learned to really appreciate that about him, especially when she earned a basketball scholarship to a school in Texas.

“I do follow a lot of what my father does,” she says. “He was basically my coach for every single sport I played.

“He was very strict with us, but also he wanted us to have a lot of fun. He always wanted us outside — never inside. I can remember doing all sorts of fun things.”

Nicole says he’s the same loving dad to her brother and two sisters, but she’s the only one of the children who dives, so it’s their “special little thing.”

Brown agrees with his daughter that every day is sort of like Father’s Day to him.

It’s not just because of his kids, though. He thinks about his own dad, who died in 2005, at least once every day. His favourite memories of his father involve regular drives to Seaside Park — their former home was in Africville — where they would eat burgers and talk.

“Him and I were really, really close,” Brown says. “Those were the best times that I ever had with my dad.”

He says he adopted a lot of his father’s parenting style, and he hopes Nicole takes to heart what he learned: “Be humble, be positive, respect others and always remember that blood is thicker than water.”

Nicole, mom to little Cordai Lamar Brown, says she and her siblings won’t stray too far from the way they were raised.

“Everything that we got to do with my father when we were younger, now all of our kids are going to experience it,” she says.

I think this is an excellent story and I agree with everything you say know how you feel, my son and I took up Scuba diving when he was 16 and haved dived in the same spots as the nice folks in this story. Scuba diving helped him gain confidence and to believe in himself, I used to say in our one on one chats, "if you can put a tank of air on and go down 60 feet, you can do anything son."

This helped us to come closer as a father and son and most importantly help my son to believe in himself and gain confidence,at an age when a lot of times the exact opposite happens. He is the best son ever and a darn good scuba diver as well.